Privileged white people need to talk more about professional networking

I want to talk about one aspect of structural racism that I don’t think privileged people like me talk about enough: the role that our social and professional networks play in giving us the jobs and opportunities we have. 

With the exception of directly hiring people, there might not be a professional activity I’ve felt more personally conflicted about since graduating from college than informational interviews. On one hand, I love meeting new people, finding common interests, and learning about others’ career experiences (or sharing my own), and find that these conversations open up new career possibilities. On the other, I recognize that our society’s reliance on personal connections to make hiring decisions gives privileged, well-connected people a leg up and excludes many others from jobs they are qualified for.

A bit of context about why I’m writing about this…

I have benefitted enormously from professional networks

Somewhat regularly, I speak with friends of friends, students at my alma mater, and others about my experiences working at the Brookings Institution. Brookings tends to catch the attention of people who are looking to start careers in public policy. I didn’t have a particularly important role, but having worked there for 3.5 years as a research staffer, I got to know people across the Institution and became pretty well-versed with how the place functions. 

In most conversations, I share some version of my own path to Brookings. I want to be truthful about how people get jobs in my field, and think that it’s often more helpful to share specific, personal stories than to try to sum up universal principles about job hunting from my very limited vantage point (though I feel confident in saying that it’s always a good idea to spell the organization’s name right…)

Here’s what I tell people about my own path to Brookings:

1. I moved to DC without a job, a privilege I could take thanks to Raffie having one and the knowledge that my parents would be able to loan me money if I needed it. 
2. I started talking with as many people I could, including people in my college network, people from my high school, parents’ friends, and others they would introduce me to. 
3. One of these people was a friend from college who worked at Brookings. She put me in touch with a colleague of hers, who met me for coffee. He put me in touch with another colleague, who also got coffee with me. 
4. Around the same time, I applied for the position that I’d eventually be offered.
5. This third-degree connection knew the hiring manager for my eventual job, and put in a good word for me. Brookings has an extended interview process that all candidates go through, but this kind of recommendation likely moved my application from the general pool to the shortlist of candidates who get initial interviews, which would have improved my chances significantly.

It’s worth noting that everyone in this chain of conversations was white. The people I spoke with were roughly my age, had gone to expensive colleges like I did, and had many other similar life experiences as I had. We genuinely bonded and found plenty of interesting things to talk about, but I have no doubt that these connections were easier given our similar backgrounds. 

It seems clear to me that only a fraction of people could have been hired in the way I was, which to me raises troubling questions about the ways that our society makes job opportunities available. But my story isn’t unique – this sort of reliance on personal connections is the norm, not the exception.

Most American workers rely on professional connections to find jobs

Research backs up my anecdotal experiences. One survey by Pew found that about two-thirds of recently hired Americans relied on personal or professional connections, and about 1 in 5 said it was their “most important resource” for finding a job.

Figure 1: Most Americans used personal or professional connections in their last job search

Source: Pew Research Center, 2015

And the field of public policy is especially dependent on networking. LinkedIn research revealed that 1 in 4 new hires in the sector have a direct LinkedIn connection with an existing employee at their new place of work (as I did). Management consulting, finance, and tech have similarly high prevalence of personal connections. By contrast, fewer than 1 in 10 new hires in the food service, delivery, and retail sectors have personal connections with existing employees. 

Figure 2: Tech, politics, and consulting rely most on employees’ personal networks; delivery services, restaurants, and retail are least reliant

Source: LinkedIn research, 2015

Any guesses as to which industries pay more? Or which group of workers tends to be safely working from home these days, and which are risking their lives to meet people’s basic needs?

The result, as many others have noted, is that fields like public policy and tech can be clubby ‘good old boy’ networks that elevate traditionally advantaged groups (namely, white men) at the expense of less-advantaged groups (such as women and Black and Hispanic workers). It’s not surprising that 85% of workers in the business, professional, and political association sector, 80% of management consultants, and 76% of workers in the grantmaking and advocacy sector are white, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.*

*These figures include Hispanic Americans who identify as white.

So should we get rid of professional networking entirely?

Networking in its current form undeniably reinforces privilege across generations and contributes to present-day inequalities. It undermines businesses’ efforts to create fair hiring processes. It is at the core of a complicated and largely opaque opportunity structure for our society’s most desirable occupations that leaves many people out. And ultimately, every person suffers within economic systems reliant on networking, as being surrounded by like-minded peers leads to more limited worldviews and unchecked blind spots. It seems reasonable to aspire to a world in which networking plays an increasingly insignificant role. Companies’ efforts to conduct blind application reviews, hire using skills-based testing, and refuse to consider personal recommendations during the hiring process all can be considered steps in this direction.

But it’s hard to imagine eliminating professional networking from our lives entirely – and I’m not sure we’d want to. Clearly, professional networking serves a valuable purpose: it alerts people to job opportunities that fit their skills, lets them meet others who do similar work, and helps them learn useful things about the labor market. Plus, as Yuval Harari reminds us in his book Sapiens, humans may live with space age technologies, but our genetic makeup isn’t much different from the hunter-gatherers who roamed the earth in small groups 50,000 years ago; we’re fundamentally social creatures who rely on personal interactions in nearly every aspect of our lives, work included.

Where does that leave us? Our existing networking practices deserve scrutiny, and those of us who (like me) have benefitted most from it have the most work to do. I’m no expert on these issues, but here are a few things I think we could do:

1. Talk more openly about networking. Be honest with yourself and others about your own career experiences; doing so can help counteract the harmful myth that success is a function of some idealized notion of ‘merit’ alone. 
2. Seek out opportunities to connect with people who have life experiences that differ from your own. To use social capital terminology, networking too often supports “bonding” within like-minded groups rather than “bridging” between different groups. This is both inequitable and professionally limiting: in my experience, we tend to learn more and produce better work when multiple perspectives contribute. Finding the right opportunities to “bridge” can be tremendously beneficial for everyone involved.
3. Be willing to rethink the many unwritten rules of networking and accept others who don’t follow them. I learned professional networking social norms through my predominantly white social circles, and am mindful that these are not the only ways to approach job-seeking conversations. I’m not going to fault someone for asking about my salary or not sending me a thank-you email, for instance.
4. Find ways to de-emphasize personal connections in hiring processes. When hiring interns at Brookings, I deliberately ignored recommendations by friends and colleagues about specific applicants, and experimented with name-blind application reviews. There are undoubtedly many other ways to reduce bias when considering applicants. 
5. Be very skeptical of company referral policies. Referral policies at their worst merely replicate the inequalities present in our labor market, leading companies to select from the same limited pool of disproportionately privileged candidates. Ask hiring managers how these incentive systems contribute to (or undermine) goals for a diverse workplace.

I recognize that there’s an irony to sharing this message with people within my personal network. But if you know of someone who wants to work in the policy world and wants someone to talk to, particularly if they are not a straight white guy like me, feel free to put us in touch. I’m trying to figure out a more equitable approach to professional networking, and know that I can’t do so alone. I’d be grateful for help that you can offer, and would be thrilled to have you join me in rethinking your approach to networking.

P.S. For anyone who has made it to the end of this post, I wanted to ask: Have you found any particularly good ways to broaden your network? Do you have ideas about how to pursue a career without reinforcing the old boys’ club dynamics that have perpetuated inequality?